A Galactic Campaign setting

[Tom Kalbfus]

Suppose you wanted a Galactic campaign setting in the scope of Star Wars or Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, You have a Galactic Empire which lasted 12,000 years and then collapsed leaving a Galaxy wide dark ages. The FTL drive in this campaign is the hyperdrive. the Galaxy is about 30,000 parsecs in radius. The various hyperdrives available are as follows:
Hyperdrive Speed
1 = 1000 parsecs per day
2 = 1414 parsecs per day
3 = 1732 parsecs per day
4 = 2000 parsecs per day
5 = 2236 parsecs per day
6 = 2449 parsecs per day

 

[JMISBEST]

Sounds like a very good idea. Keep up the good work and if you give more info on it can I use it as a basis for my new race ideas Uber-Empire

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

The rest of the Galactic campaign is not more advanced than tech level 15 excepting its incredibly efficient hyperdrive. Habitable planets are extremely rare in the Galaxy. Over the 12,000 year lifetime of the Galactic Empire, it when to incredible trouble to terraform a large number of planets, these planets typically now have standard atmosphere and tend are sizes 6, 7, and 8 in size with a rare size 9 planet. The Galaxy teams with life, but the only technology using sophonts are humans, they got into space first and colonized the entire galaxy. Alien ecosystems tend to be inhospitable to human life, so most of the planets humans life on tend to be terraformed to their specifications, that is they have roughly 24-hour days, years can vary, when they are short the planets have little seasonal variation. Humans tend to travel from garden world to garden world. With the decline and fall of the galactic empire the ability to terraform additional planets was largely lost, no society has the patience for that sort of thing, it is much easier to fight over existing real estate instead, and the hyperdrive allows for this. The planets that don't support human life are ignored except as possible mining locations. Usually the planets that are closest to habitable planets are mined for materials if they are not themselves habitable, they are usually in the same system as a habitable planet, though it is often cheaper just to mine the habitable planets themselves. Science and technology has regressed since the time of the Galactic Empire. Certain capabilities were lost.

 

[Rick]

Interesting. But does it need to be so vast in it's scope? Some of the best sci-fi has been in extremely limited locales - Firefly; a few planets, but detailed and varied. The Expanse; just the solar system, again detailed and varied settings on each of the planets. With most of the others, even with a vast array of habitable planets to explore, most of the settings are on just a select few, or within limits that restrict the number of locations. I'm not automatically dismissing your idea, but could you accomplish the same goals of your setting with fewer, more detailed planets? One of Traveller's flaws (and possibly strengths) has been the sheer number of planets involved, with very few having been given a detailed background.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Interesting. But does it need to be so vast in it's scope? Some of the best sci-fi has been in extremely limited locales - Firefly; a few planets, but detailed and varied. The Expanse; just the solar system, again detailed and varied settings on each of the planets. With most of the others, even with a vast array of habitable planets to explore, most of the settings are on just a select few, or within limits that restrict the number of locations. I'm not automatically dismissing your idea, but could you accomplish the same goals of your setting with fewer, more detailed planets? One of Traveller's flaws (and possibly strengths) has been the sheer number of planets involved, with very few having been given a detailed background.

I was inspired by Issac Asimov's Foundation series, it has a lot in common with Traveller, only its scope is much more vast. In Asimov's setting there was a Galactic Empire which lasted for 12,000 years, and then there was Hari Seldon who forcast its downfall, but he had a plan to shorten the dark ages that would follow to a mere one thousand years as opposed to ten thousand years. I don't know about Psychohistory, but the idea of a galactic dark ages is an intriguing one. The technology which would be required to hold a galactic empire together still exists, and that is the hyperdrive. The Empire created a lot of habitable planets, but for every habitable planet there are one million star systems which don't have habitable planets. The Empire had a selection criterion for determining which planets they would terraform:
1. It had to orbit a class K, G, or F type star.
2. It had to orbit within the star's life zone.
3. It has to be of at least size 6 and no more than size 9.
4. The planet has to have a day between 22 and 26 hours long.
5. It cannot have an axial tilt greater than 20 degrees.

There are things which can be done to terraform planets or moons that don't meet this criterion, but they are expensive, and there are millions of planets to choose from per hex in the map. There are about 100 star systems within a 20 light year radius, within 40 light years is 800, within 60 light years its 2700 within 200 light years there are 100,000 stars. Within 132 parsecs (430 light years) there are on average one million star systems. 1000 light years is approximately 306 parsecs, we'll use 300 parsec hexes for the galactic map. Since its 30,000 light years to the center of the galaxy from our sun, that would be 30 hexes to the Galactic Center, another 20 hexes to the galactic rim. The galaxy is in total 100 hexes across. Each hex has on average 100,000 * (5/2)^3 = 1,562,500 star systems, of all those star systems, the best suited planet was terraformed by the Empire, and was seeded with Terran life. Th Empire did a lot of the heavy lifting and now it is gone. The area of a circle is

Thus if we assume the Galaxy is 50 hexes in radius with one Earth like terraformed planet in each one, that means there are 7854 habitable planets in the Galaxy, these are all planets where you don't need a space suit or even a filter mask to live on, just like in Star Wars.

 

[Rick]

Ok Tom, I am familiar with the Foundation series and you have released a lot of information not really germane to the question I asked. So I'll try again - why is a vast, sprawling area of space important to your setting? What is special about this setting that it needs such a huge canvas to work with? Could you accomplish the same with a smaller area of space and fewer, more detailed and varied planets?

As an aside, the idea of a galactic dark ages was a very common theme of 60's and 70's (pre Star Trek) sci-fi; a lot of authors that influenced Traveller used it, either in the dying days of the golden age or expansion era before the dark age (Poul Anderson's Retief series), during (H Beam Piper's Star Viking) or during the recovery (Edwin Tubb's Dumarest series). The common theme being that there would be a period of expansion, a technological high water mark; the whole area would get too big to govern as a single unity, it would break up into pocket empires and then you'd have devastating interstellar wars which would destroy the technological base and lead to a regression, a dark age of lower technology followed by a gradual recovery. Traveller: TNE for all its faults (virus!) was a good setting for this concept.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Ok Tom, I am familiar with the Foundation series and you have released a lot of information not really germane to the question I asked. So I'll try again - why is a vast, sprawling area of space important to your setting? What is special about this setting that it needs such a huge canvas to work with? Could you accomplish the same with a smaller area of space and fewer, more detailed and varied planets?

As an aside, the idea of a galactic dark ages was a very common theme of 60's and 70's (pre Star Trek) sci-fi; a lot of authors that influenced Traveller used it, either in the dying days of the golden age or expansion era before the dark age (Poul Anderson's Retief series), during (H Beam Piper's Star Viking) or during the recovery (Edwin Tubb's Dumarest series). The common theme being that there would be a period of expansion, a technological high water mark; the whole area would get too big to govern as a single unity, it would break up into pocket empires and then you'd have devastating interstellar wars which would destroy the technological base and lead to a regression, a dark age of lower technology followed by a gradual recovery. Traveller: TNE for all its faults (virus!) was a good setting for this concept.

So I'll try again - why is a vast, sprawling area of space important to your setting?

Do you remember the New Era setting for Traveller? What happened to people living on planets that could not naturally support human life when technology collapsed? They died right? How many Earth lik planets that could support human life do you suppose could exist in our Galaxy? I mean realistically! there are many variables that would make a planet unsuitable for humans to live on without massive engineering to alter it. Changing a planet's rotation or orbit is a massive undertaking, it would be much easier to change a planet's atmosphere with biology assuming the other factors of the planet's environment are just right. Having a whole galaxy of planets available makes finding the right sort of planets to terraform a lot easier. Also having a Galaxy devoid of other intelligent technological life other than humans fits in with the Fermi paradox we now find ourselves in. Maybe intelligent life is rare, and when one species meets another the technological differences are usually so vast that one utterly dominates the other. the idea behind this campaign is that humans are the most advanced life forms in the galaxy, we encounter a bunch of primitive races that are in the stone ages at best, and we typically ignore their planets, as an existing ecosystem makes them harder to terraform to our liking, most likely other factors aren't suitable to us anyway, and its much easier to fin another planet than to alter a planets spin or orbit, when we have fast FTL available to us.

Now would that be a good reason to have a Galactic campaign having a few thousand habitable planets among hundreds of billions seems like a realistic probability to me, given that we have yet to detect any intelligent extraterrestrial signal.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Ok Tom, I am familiar with the Foundation series and you have released a lot of information not really germane to the question I asked. So I'll try again - why is a vast, sprawling area of space important to your setting? What is special about this setting that it needs such a huge canvas to work with? Could you accomplish the same with a smaller area of space and fewer, more detailed and varied planets?

As an aside, the idea of a galactic dark ages was a very common theme of 60's and 70's (pre Star Trek) sci-fi; a lot of authors that influenced Traveller used it, either in the dying days of the golden age or expansion era before the dark age (Poul Anderson's Retief series), during (H Beam Piper's Star Viking) or during the recovery (Edwin Tubb's Dumarest series). The common theme being that there would be a period of expansion, a technological high water mark; the whole area would get too big to govern as a single unity, it would break up into pocket empires and then you'd have devastating interstellar wars which would destroy the technological base and lead to a regression, a dark age of lower technology followed by a gradual recovery. Traveller: TNE for all its faults (virus!) was a good setting for this concept.

One other reason is that a Galaxy is easier to map on the large scale because its flat.

The Galactic disk is about 1000 parsecs thick, so if I have hexes that are 1000 parsecs wide, that takes care of that. I don't need to make 3-dimensional maps to be realistic, and I don't need to include everything in those maps, just the important things. This map above can be broken into hexes, I can put dots in those hexes which represent worlds that are located somewhere in each of those hexes. I think its a fairly safe bet that each hex will have an inhabited world in it.